Hey everyone!
It is John again, and time for another delve into the art side of the game.
As you may have noticed from our updates and posts, our focus for the art has shifted between various things (e.g., particle effects, mountain rocks, etc) over the past few weeks and months. This is largely due to the feedback we received from you regarding what it felt like to play the game, as well as us spending our (far too limited) time wherever we felt it was most needed.
With the mountain rocks largely finished, I have now been able to return to one of my bigger, longer term goals: To get the new Villager models in place. I am saying models, instead of singular model, as I have been also working on a female villager to go along with the preview you had of the male villager from a few blogs back.
As you can see from the screenshot below, a first draft of her has been modelled and partially textured at this point and I have been focusing on skinning the characters and rigging them.
Skinning is when you make an armature (set of bones) and then connect the mesh for the model to those bones so when you move the bone, the mesh moves too. As you can imagine, this does not always work as expected on the first try, and I have been working through many issues with stretching and clipping and trying to get them to work seamlessly. It can be a barrel of laughs, I assure you.
Rigging is when you take those bones, and set constraints to them, so they move more naturally. Technically, you do not need to rig the bones, and I didn’t for the iteration of the villager in the game currently. I took each bone individually and animated rotation and movement for them to simulate the walking or the shooting that we have. Frankly, I am still impressed with how well they came out considering – and with the rigged armatures, I am hopeful that the new animations will both look more natural, and that we will be able to implement them more smoothly in the game.
In addition to the rigging, I have also set up inverse kinematics, as well as extra bones for more flexible movement. For instance, I have rigged the feet so that the toes initially remain on the ground while the heel tilts, simulating the Villager pushing off with their foot for forward movement. Another good example is the spine curving with different strengths so we better simulate the bend in the back while the hips and shoulders can move independently.
It is a lot more work at this stage - but with the upcoming animation of the characters, it is going to be a great deal easier and quicker to get more natural movements. Additionally, we can plug the inverse kinematics into Unity too - so the characters can react to the different levels of the terrain, so their feet can stick to inclines etc. At the moment, we are not planning to use all of the bones (we are not using the “bones” for the eyes, for example), but as we are continuing development, I hope that we will be able to implement more and more animations to use the full range of options we are giving ourselves with the new system.
Until next week!